I’ve been in Bali three weeks now and I understand the appeal of this place.

These are some shots I took this morning on my 3min scooter commute to the workspace.

I pass 4 different Hindu temples on the way to work each day and all of them have intricate stonework.

Speaking of scootering, I picked up this stowaway the other day. He just jumped on my scooter and sat there like “where are we going?” Adorable.

This place has torrential rains most days around 4pm. It reminds me of the way the monsoons used to be in Arizona way back in the day before Phoenix was a concrete jungle.

I took this video yesterday while I was working on the Esperanca mobile app. It probably rained 3” yesterday in this storm. No wonder it’s so lush here.

It’s been Galungan and Kuningan holidays recently and the roads are lined with these giant bamboo poles with offerings on the end of them. Every doorway has a little tray of cigarettes, coffee, candy and incense. And at any given moment you’ll be driving and the road will get blocked off with a procession of people playing percussion instruments and dressed up like a life-sized monster.

Food here continues to impress. Their produce is next-level and everything is served with bamboo straws and wooden spoons.

I can definitely see how people come intending to make a brief visit and end up staying years here. My Portuguese residency requirements dictate that I need to get back to Lisbon in a month but 100% this will not be the last time I visit Indonesia.

Our Charity Makeover event is at full capacity with 2 weeks to go. We’re focused now on forming teams and laying the strategy for what we’ll be doing for each charity at the upcoming event. If you want to follow along with that effort follow @charitymakeover_ or visit charitymakeover.org and sign up. (at Canggu)https://www.instagram.com/p/B9Oi1DjnUxZ/?igshid=gwmlrry6owbg

We’ve been here in Canggu just over two weeks now. My favorite thing so far was the long, winding drive yesterday to Udara. There was this giant temple in the middle of the rice paddy.

Perfectly paved and shaded road zigzagging through the countryside.

Every Sunday they have morning lineup of yoga, ecstatic dance, sound healing and chanting. The DJ yesterday was playing these hypnotic tribal beats and there must have been 300 people there.

The food has been excellent so far. I get this breakfast and a juice pretty much every day for 100 IDR (~$7).

Our coworkers are a little noisy in the workspace but we tolerate them because they’re so adorable.

We’re here during the rainy season which means almost every day around 4pm these massive thunderheads roll in and dump rain on us. You have to time your scooter rides accordingly and keep a poncho under the seat.

This reincarnation of Jimmy Hendrix melted my face last weekend. Speaking of face-melting: I’m excited to be playing my first open mic here tonight. I’m dusting off some old original tunes. Love that the venue is named after a Ben Howard song – that bodes well.

Our next Charity Makeover event is less than 3wks out and we’re in full prep mode. We’re supporting 5 different charities (2 of which are local Balinese ones). ?@charitymakeover_

I’m using this opportunity to build out the tooling necessary for running events exclusively through our app. The “Nocode” movement is a game-changer for entrepreneurs. The goal is to be able to be a consumer of this app and use it ourselves for everything. Once we can run things entirely without cheating and updating the site manually or opening direct access to the database, we will have reached v1 of the platform and it will be fully possible for anyone to bring Charity Makeover to his/her town using our platform.

About 50 people from Nomad Cruise have reunited in Bali, Indonesia and are roaming around. This was a
reunion gathering on one of our very first days in town.

I’ve only been in Bali a week now but it’s long enough to vouch that it is truly a magical place and I totally get the appeal now. I’m super glad I learned how to ride a scooter in Koh Tao because it’s pure chaos on the roads here.

The sunsets rival those of Costa Rica.

And they have these elaborate Hindu statues in random places.

I recorded my last podcast for Pagely on the rooftop of our cowork space this week with the amazing @poondingo. Could not have asked for a better last guest.

My transition out of my role there is now complete and thus ends a 4.5yr era. I was reminiscing back through my photos from Remote Year and subsequent travels at some of the amazing places it’s enabled me to work.

They are hiring for a couple positions. If you want to apply for the opp to work in this amazing culture visit pagely.com/careers to see what they have available.

I told myself I’d take some time off before going heads-down on @charitymakeover_ but the reality is I’m freakin’ excited to make this thing go. This is one of the
charities we’ll be working with at our next event: East Bali Poverty Project. They are doing amazing work in remote villages in Bali and are helping solve sanitation, clean water, education and work needs. They empower the locals to make these bamboo bikes which are then sold and the revenue of which goes to fund their development efforts. Win win.

We went to a waterpark yesterday and spent the day trouncing around like 5-yr-olds hitting all the slides. I can’t remember the last time I went to a water park but it was such a great day up until the last run when someone in our crew hit her head on the slide and broke some teeth. Be careful out there. This quarter pipe shoots you 40’ completely vertical before swooshing you down into the pool. I’ve never done anything like it.

There comes a time when you take all the skills you’ve acquired over a lifetime, all the connections you’ve made, all the unique vantage points you’ve had the good fortune to have and you go all-in on your Ikigai. For me, that time is now.

I read two books over the holidays: “The One Thing” by Gary Keller and “The Courage to Be Disliked” by Ichiro Kishimi. Both were profound in their own ways and the net result was that they tipped me to make the decision to leave an amazing job that has allowed me to work with incredible people doing interesting work from all over the world. By every stretch I had achieved the grail of employment and I’ve just decided to let it all go.

Pagely has been the best job I’ve ever held. Culture-wise it is bar none the best organization I’ve had the pleasure to be involved with. It has allowed me to live in 38 countries in the last four years and has given me a virtual family, stable income and purpose (they’re hiring BTW). But I realized over the holidays that a) my heart is now elsewhere and b) I am likely no longer what the company truly needs. It was not an easy decision but I’m taking a leap of faith here and committing all my energy to a cause that I believe is the highest and best use of me for generating maximum positive benefit for the world.

Charity Makeover is a project I started as an experiment way back in 2013 to test the idea that we could tap into the unique talents of knowledge workers and assemble temporary teams to help local charities overcome the main challenges that hold them back. Think of it like a virtual Habitat for Humanity, a “digital barn raising for non-profits” if you will (hence the barn logo). We get the right set of smart people in the room and build game-changing digital assets for the local charities of their area which are poised to have incredible impact but lacking the in-house resources to overcome their hurdles on their own.

This effort was back-burnered for a number of years but always lingered as being the one thing I felt I was born to bring to the world.

I was a participant of a conference at sea called Nomad Cruise back in April of last year and on a lark decided to pitch this idea at their “Piraña Tank” mini replica of Shark Tank. You can find my pitch here:

That led to me reviving the effort and organizing an event in Lisbon which then led to a friend I made on that cruise gaining interest in being involved at a core level. On a visit Ben Lakoff made to Lisbon over a series of conversations we decided to partner up and work together to advance the idea. We executed the next event in Barcelona successfully and we felt the momentum.

Fast forward to today on my last day for Pagely… I stand on the precipice of leaving the safety of the company I’ve known for my entire remote existence and am diving head-long into the uncertainty a project with no proven revenue model nor investors but represents the single greatest lever I can think of to move the world.

If you want to follow our journey with this our Instagram will have updates or join my bi-annual personal email update. For now we’re busy preparing for our next event in Bali, Indonesia on March 14th and laying the foundational platform and playbook so that this becomes essentially “wikipedia-like” in the ability for anyone to extend it to his/her town. I’m taking all that I’ve acquired from my 25-year career in the way of knowledge, connections and passion and assembling the crew and tech to turn this into a global movement.

There’s a quote by Tim O’Reilly I put on the T-shirts for the Lisbon event. And it is our mantra:

“Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried.”
-Tim O’Reilly

I’m confident we’ll zigzag our way to a sustainable revenue model with the runway we have. We have a hypothesis now would love an intro to people who work in HR and Corporate Social Responsibility for Enterprises to validate or refine this. In the event of some catastrophic scenario where we fail to make this effort sustainable, it will still have changed many lives for the better in the process and therefore cannot ultimately be a failure.

Thanks to my parents, my friends who have encouraged me to make this leap, Pagely for being supportive and Ben for being the first follower as we morph this into a movement. To the charity founders in the trenches who are fighting the hard fight without reinforcements, air support is on the way. Hang in there.

It’s been an epic six weeks. I got the advanced dive certification and am intending to use it to wreck dive in Bali.

I got to shred (twice) at the Good Vibes open mic and @rickculbertsonbkk and I laid down some sweet harmonies.

I ate this meal at Coconut Monkey at least 30x.

Despite what appears to be an unending vacation I actually worked. A lot.

Happy with the progress on Jan goals. Fell short on a few but made a solid dent.

Decided to make this a monthly ritual and made some new ones for Feb.

Hard to believe we began this crazy adventure in Athens mid-Nov.

The big news is my 4.5yr run as Director of Sales for Pagely is coming to an end. I’m taking some time off then devoting my energy full-time to the @CharityMakeover_ project I started. I’ve teamed up with @benlakoff to make a run at turning this into a global movement. (BTW Please somebody have a connection at Instagram so we can evict the @charitymakekover squatter and not have an underscore in our handle).

Pagely has enriched me on multiple levels and I am grateful to have worked alongside some badass human beings doing my work from all over the world these past 4yrs. What an incredibly epic ride it has been. Tomorrow begins a new chapter in Bali. (at ?????????? ???????????????)https://www.instagram.com/p/B8MYZtuHYgb/?igshid=1kcnx8x6mpq32

This weekend I got my Advanced Open Water diver certification and overcame my fear of deep diving.

I did a total of 5 dives including a night dive where we saw an octopus, a bunch of weird fish and bioluminescent plankton. We turned off our flashlights under water and in the pitch black waved our hands to agitate the water and 1000’s of these little shimmering creatures lit up in the wake of the disturbance- it was an unforgettable alien-like experience.

This last month has been one of conquering multiple fears. My friend @rickculbertsonbkk taught me the basics of how to ride a scooter and I’ve been using it to get around all the past week gradually beating my fear of 2-wheeled vehicles.

@helensimkins and I found a spot on the other side of the island where people live in these little houses on stilts right about the bluest water.

We discovered @savagekohtao has a killer Sunday pool volleyball scene.

I’ve eaten 90% of my meals at @coconut.monkey and can’t stop ordering their Buddha Bowl. If I had to eat this dish every day for the rest of my life I’d 100% be okay with that.

I finally finished Gary Keller’s “The ONE Thing” book, implemented his methodology using a mind mapping tool and started applying his focusing question to my own goals. So far so good. Too early to testify to this but it’s a useful lens to guide what you work on next. Highly recommend his book (check his podcast interview with Tim Ferriss for a sample of what he’s about).

In other news I’ve been steadily improving @iceman_hof retention times and can now hold my breath for over 4min. W00t.

We’ve seen amazing sunset upon sunset…?

…upon epic sunset on this beautiful island. The coworking space has been legit with 200/300MB internet up/down and has provided a productive space to do my work for Pagely. Here for another two weeks then headed over to Bali to meet up with friends there. Hope your 2020 is off to a good start. ? (at Koh Tao Island)https://www.instagram.com/p/B7h7mVmH-sa/?igshid=1583zo9h84fwj